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Sounds like Jeffery Snover’s daughter is eager for Christmas to arrive. She was wanting to know how many days she had left to wait, so of course he wrote her a PowerShell function so that she could always find out.

I called my daughter over to explain what a wonderful tool PowerShell was. I explained that if she ever wanted to get the date, all she had to do was to type “Get-Date”. I then explained how she could cast a string containing a date into a datetime object: [Datetime]“12/25/2011″ . She didn’t get that one so I quickly moved on to explain that the reason why that mattered is that PowerShell is … well … powerful and that it does something called “object math”. Object math (the ability to perform mathematical operations on any object which supports them) made everyone’s life easier because that means you can do things like:PS> [DateTime]“12/25/2011″ – (Get-Date)

The iPhone 4S is a nice device, and I’ve had fun using the voice integration with SIRI, but it seems more like beta code than a released product. If I were the Product Manager for SIRI, I would make several changes –

Open Source the answers SIRI gives so that web users and the developers could see common questions that SIRI is asked that it could not answer, and they could build the correct responses for them.

Make SIRI handle “No Network” issues better – it seems like some basic functions should work without network access.

Give more feedback on why it can’t accomplish certain tasks – why you can’t set certain alerts or launch applications.

Make it smarter for reading email – if you can’t handle the amount of email I have, then handle the number of emails you can handle.

Every day at almost exactly 1:30 pm I walk into the lunch room to refill my water and Joan is there eating her lunch and reading her book. This is not planned, but it happens like clockwork. It is almost creepy. Even though I just got back from a week vacation, I still grabbed my afternoon water right on time and Joan was sitting there eating her lunch.